1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to hardware configuration management, and more particularly, to a future system that can participate in automation, grouping, and other systems management activities until an actual system is on-line.
2. Background Information
By way of background, policy based automation solutions match workloads and resources to service level agreements. In automated data centers, the servers, networks, storage, and other resources are managed in pools, known as system or resource pools. Systems configuration management is used to match and schedule workloads and tasks on the available resources in the system pool. Health and availability monitors are used to detect when old resources drop out of the pool and new resources come on-line. As the system pool grows and evolves, new resources are added to the pool that can be scheduled to service more and more jobs.
In the past, the addition of a new resource in a system pool has meant that the configuration and detailed setup of the resource could not proceed until the resource was actually delivered and placed on-line. The configuration and detailed setup of the new resource would take place once the new resource was on-line in the system pool. As can be appreciated, systems management applications take some time to set up and fully manage a resource. In conventional systems, each newly added resource in a pool can require time and inject delays in regaining full system management, until the detailed setup of the new resource can be completed. This approach has often imposed substantial delays in getting the new resource up and running and potentially more delays before the resource was fully managed.